Protecting Russia’s orphans

A new agreement between Russia and the United States on adoptions will be signed in May, but real hope for Russia's orphans can only begin with changes at home.

The Russian government
is finally tackling the problem of adoptions by foreign citizens in earnest. A watershed
event is scheduled to take place in May: the signing of a bilateral agreement
on adoptions between Russia and the United States. The signing will take place
at a meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton. The agreement was prepared by the staff of Pavel Astakhov,
Children Rights Commissioner for the president of the Russian Federation.

The need for such an
agreement has long been apparent. Over the last 20 years, according to official
statistics, Americans have adopted some 60,000 Russian children. In the opinion
of Astakhov, the actual number is substantially higher—around 100,000. In the
mid-1990s, some 14,000 children left Russia for the United States every year.
What’s more, this went on almost illegally. Various private agencies dealt
directly with the heads of orphanages and for a stipulated reward “redeemed”
this or that child. Small wonder that Russian authorities know nothing about
the fates of hundreds of children taken out of the country in this way. Russian
children are adopted not only by Americans, but also by citizens of the UK,
France, Italy, Germany, Holland, Norway and Sweden. But up until now, Russia
has had an official agreement regulating adoptions only with Italy, and even
that agreement was concluded only after a scandal erupted over the illegal
export of Russian children.

The American agreement
was preceded by five rounds of negotiations as well as countless scandals
involving adoptive parents. Seventeen children adopted from Russia have died in
the United States in recent years. The last straw, significantly hastening the
agreement’s signing date, was the case of Artem Savelyev. His American adoptive
mother simply put him on a plane back to Russia with a note saying that she was
renouncing him.

If a bilateral
agreement had existed, Artem’s adoptive family could not simply have thrown him
out like some object that had ceased to please. They would at least have had to
pay child support to the government or to another adoptive family.

The new agreement envisions
not only the possibility of paying child support, but also other means of
controlling the adoption process. For example, agencies involved in these
matters will have to receive accreditation not only in the United States, but
also in Russia. They will have to collect information about future adoptive
parents and monitor the situation in the foreign family after the adoption.
Finally, and most important of all, this agreement will apply retroactively and
cover all adoptions of Russian children by American citizens in the last 16
years.

Today the number of
children taken abroad by adoptive families is significantly less than it was:
between 3,000 and 4,000 a year. The number of orphans in Russia is also
decreasing from year to year. In 2005 there were some 450,000, today that
number has decreased to 370,000. This decrease is the result of two things: an
overall drop in the Russian population, and the placement of orphans in
adoptive or foster families in Russia. According to the Ministry of Education, around
9,000 children are adopted every year by Russian citizens.

But many problems
remain. The Russian government has said that the number of children in
orphanages must be reduced; five years ago then-President Vladimir Putin
published a decree on the subject. But in reality nothing has changed.

In the opinion of
experts from the Ministry of Education, the number of orphans could be reduced through
a special foster care system to help both poor families and adoptive parents.
Today, the guardianship system has a mainly punitive function: It imposes fines
on negligent parents, deprives them of their parental rights and puts their
children in orphanages.

Positive examples of
such services already exist in several regions of Russia, such as Tyumen. They
help families in need find work or organize a small business. They offer these
families financial subsidies as well as treatment for alcohol or drug
dependence, if necessary. Most importantly, there is no talk of depriving these
parents of their parental rights and putting their children in orphanages.

A draft law drawn up
by the Ministry of Education would make such help mandatory. You would think
that no one could object to a much needed law like that. But it has prompted
real resistance. The problem, it turns out, is money. In recent years the
oil-rich Russian government has spent large sums on orphans—over 6 billion
rubles ($20,000,000) a year. To provide for a child in an orphanage officially costs
between 45,000 and 65,000 rubles (from $1,500 to $2,000) a month. Yet there are
few families in Russia that can afford to spend that much money on their own
children. Needless to say, not all of that official money goes directly to the
orphans. A substantial part of it goes to pay for all the various staff members
in orphanages. Boris Altshuler, head of the NGO Right of the Child and a member
of the Public Chamber, is convinced that regional departments in charge of
social welfare are opposing the draft law because they do not want to lose the
vast sums allotted to them by the government. If fewer children are put in
orphanages and increasingly placed in adoptive and foster families, then in
time orphanages will disappear altogether.

For now we have a
constant turnover of orphans in Russia, since it’s easier to put children in
orphanages than to bring them up in families. True, the Ministry of Education has
promised not to abandon its efforts to push the law on foster care through the
State Duma. But it looks as though the ministry’s efforts alone will not be
enough. Without the explicit support of the Russian president, it will scarcely
be possible to overcome the current resistance.